


Of Star-Touched Skin

by catlike



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Written as otp but could be read as brotp and canon compliant, whouffle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:20:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22308571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catlike/pseuds/catlike
Summary: He’s a fairy tale. He’solderthan a fairy tale. He’s seen stars burn out and die and entire galaxies fade away to nothing. But there’s stardust in his eyes, and Clara swears -swears- that he always carries part of the universe inside him, that there are nebulas in his veins, that there are stories and starlight older than half the world written into his bones.Or: Three moments Clara spends with the Doctor, during Trenzalore and in its aftermath.
Relationships: Eleventh Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald, Eleventh Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald, The Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald, The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Clara Oswin Oswald
Comments: 18
Kudos: 130





	Of Star-Touched Skin

01.

He’s a fairy tale. He’s _older_ than a fairy tale. He’s seen stars burn out and die and entire galaxies fade away to nothing. But there’s stardust in his eyes, and Clara swears - _swears_ \- that the Doctor always carries part of the universe inside him, that there are nebulas in his veins, that there are stories and starlight older than half the world written into his bones.

And here’s the thing: she cannot let him die.

She will _not_ let him die.

They are on Trenzalore, in a dying TARDIS overtaken with vines. The stars are going out and the Doctor is dying, which, perhaps, Clara thinks, is the same thing. He and the universe are one and the same, after all, which is why she has to save him.

If she jumps into the time stream, it will scatter her like confetti. She'll be ripped apart and remade again and again and again, and she’ll feel herself falling like rain just to be where he is. But despite the fear she feels blooming in the pit of her stomach, she steps toward the burning red glow of his time stream anyway.

This is something she has to do.

Even if it scares her.

She hears him telling her _no,_ to _stop_ , but when has she ever let anyone tell her what to do, anyway? It’s not like her to give in to others once she’s made up her mind, not even to the Doctor.

“Run, you clever boy,” she says, and she can already imagine him running, fast and safe and ready to save another world, “and remember me.”

Just before she jumps, she spares herself one last look at him, and she focuses on his big, sad eyes that have the magnitude of a hundred burning stars.

And then she smiles.

(When she leaps, she wonders if there’ll be stars where she’s going. 

She hopes there will be.)

02.

She has searched for him all throughout history, _died_ for him all throughout history, and wherever and whenever she is, somewhere in the back of her mind is the thought _I have to save the Doctor_ , ever constant, like the cadence of her heartbeat. There are ghosts of hundreds of thousands of different lifetimes in her mind and too many questions to count, and when she dreams, she dreams of dying.

She’s dreaming she’s dying now, and it’s familiar, too familiar, in a way that twists her heart and makes her scream.

“Clara, wake up,” a voice says, interrupting her dream. The voice is one that is soft and kind, and one she’ll always trust, and she feels herself being pulled out of her sleep and back into reality. “You’re okay, Clara, I’m here. You’re safe, I _swear_ it.”

When Clara opens her eyes, she finds that she’s lying on the divan in the TARDIS library, and sees the Doctor sitting by her feet, staring at her with his ancient, worried eyes, and she wonders when the last time he slept was. 

It’s been three days since Trenzalore, and the Doctor hasn’t strayed very far from her side. He’s stood guard over her, while she’s awake and while she’s asleep, just an arm’s length away in case she reaches out for him. She feels perplexed, honestly, and maybe a little bit awed that he does. Not that the Doctor isn’t kind, not that she doubts he cares, but it’s just that he’s forever in motion, forever running (always, always, _always_ running, she thinks as she remembers chasing after him decade after decade). So it says something, she feels, that this man who’s always been in perpetual motion stops for her.

“You were reading and fell asleep in here,” the Doctor says, and Clara isn’t sure if he’s talking to her or making a mental note of where to look for her if she should wander off from him again.

Still, she answers him anyway. “Must’ve. Haven’t been sleeping much at night.”

Not since the nightmares started.

(“What do you dream about?” The Doctor had asked her, after the third time she woke up screaming, and he looked like he desperately wanted to know, but also desperately didn’t.

“Death,” she had answered him. “Like I’m dying everywhere, all at once. But also, _you_. Always you.”)

Clara sits up now, so sharply and suddenly that it makes her head spin, but she can’t lie down any longer, it feels too much like another memory she has, a distant, hazy one where she’s lying down, taking her last breaths in a blue Victorian dress while snow fills the sky. The Doctor says nothing, simply reaches out to take her hand in his, and they sit there, in the warm golden glow of the library, not moving or talking, just breathing, just _being_. 

“I’m fine now,” Clara says after several minutes have passed, and it isn’t quite the truth but it isn’t exactly a lie either. This is probably as fine as she can be right now. 

“Sorry I wasn’t here,” the Doctor says, and Clara can hear the remorse woven into his words. “I thought you were reading. I thought you would be _okay_.”

“ _Who’s_ the nanny here exactly?” Clara says, amused, and she means to scold him for worrying but her tone comes out too fondly. “You don’t have to keep an eye on me all the time, Doctor.”

”You’ve kept watch over me for centuries,” he reminds her gently. “You can rest now, Clara, _please_ , let me watch over you for once.”

He moves his hand to her face, thumb ghosting across the edge of her cheekbone again and again, as if he can leave a trail of constellations across her skin with his touch. And he’s staring at her with that look again, the look that says he’s entirely in her debt, but is still unsure of exactly why she did it, _why_ she’d spend generations dying for one stupid old man.

“I think you carry the story of the universe inside you,” she says in answer to his unasked question.

Normally, she wouldn’t say things like this to him - or to anyone, really - but now she does. Because now the TARDIS is floating somewhere up in the sky, and she feels like she’s somewhere outside of time and space. Today doesn’t count, she reasons, today she can say things she normally never would.

He raises his eyebrows at her in disbelief, as if he’s wondering if she’s caught time wind delirium and she frowns at him because he still doesn’t get it.

Clara can only see tiny glimpses of her other lives, like brief flashes of light in the fog. But she remembers moments with _him_. She always remembers him. And the thing is, his faces changed all the time, but his eyes never did, his eyes were always filled with magic and mischief and moonlight, just like the rest of him. And he doesn’t understand, thinks he’s just a madman who stole a magic box and ran away (and he is, she knows that, she was _there_ , she _helped_ ), but he’s _more_ than that. He is built of the universe, she thinks idly, with supernovas in his two hearts and binary stars in his bones.

He’s giving her a look now, one that’s lovely and sad and drives her half-mad, because he looks like he knows something she doesn’t.

“What?” she demands, raising an eyebrow. She knows when he’s not telling her things. “What are you thinking?”

“You’ve lived over and over again, scattered throughout time and space like stardust, from one end of the universe to the other, Clara Oswald,” he tells her. “You say you think I carry the story of the universe within me, but if that’s true, then now you do too. You’ve seen more sunsets and solstices and shooting stars than any other human alive. _You_ , my impossible girl, have lived thousands upon thousands of lifetimes, even more than me,” he smiles at that, and his hand is still on her cheek, the tips of his long, clever fingers touching her hair, and she finds herself leaning into his touch. “There are universes coursing through your veins and moonlight glittering in your soul, and every star that’s ever shone lives within you, you _have_ to know that, Clara.”

And when Clara’s eyes feel like they start to sting after that, she blames it on weakness from the time stream, and lets him pull her into a hug, smiling as his hands softly stroke her hair.

03.

It’s been seven days since Trenzalore and three days since Clara’s been able to sleep through the night, which means that today she finally feels well enough to go on a trip.

(“Take me somewhere peaceful,” she’d commanded the Doctor earlier. “No revolutions, no people-eating monster or alien _things_ of any size or sort, and absolutely no running.”

“Alright, you’re the boss.”

“I am, aren’t I?”)

Currently, the Doctor’s beaming at a star-map, trying to find someplace nice to go. It’s a holographic star-map, one that spreads the universe throughout the TARDIS and surrounds them with stars. There’s a tiny three-dimensional vortex thrumming by Clara’s shoulder, rumbling asteroid fields floating about the console, and above her head, tiny little clusters of stars. Unable to help herself, Clara reaches out toward a golden ringed-planet in front of her, and the glowing holograph sifts through her fingers like sand.

The Doctor walks through the map as he studies it, holographs blurring across his silhouette, and Clara is struck by how much he looks at home amongst the holographic universe. He’s glowing, the energy radiating off of him like he’s a star that’ll never burn out. She thinks of every wonder he must’ve seen: Watercolor nebulas that burned brightly in the black expanse. Patches of sky where stars were just forming. Green suns that glowed and diamond snow that spun and rain made of glass.

He has it all within him, she thinks, every wondrous, wander-lust moment. 

She remembers that she has that now too, and she wonders if she looks like he does: like she’s got a slice of the universe inside her.

Across the holographic galaxy, over the console, she feels the Doctor’s eyes on her, and when she looks up, she sees that he’s smiling softly at her like she is something magnificent, something _exquisite_.

He makes her feel like maybe she is.

The Doctor’s eyes flicker back to the star-map and he mutters an exclamation under his breath as his eyes land on the planet he’s looking for. The exclamation he makes is one made in happiness, and is almost uttered unconsciously, as if he doesn’t realize he’s thinking out loud, and it’s in a language so, so old, that Clara shouldn’t be able to understand it, but she _does_.

“ _The width and breadth of the sky_ ,” she repeats in perfect Gallifreyan, and the action is unbidden and effortless, like the words are muscle memory on her tongue.

And then she gasps, breathless and shocked and like she’s been struck by lightning, and when her eyes meet the Doctor’s, she sees he looks the same way.

They stand there, staring at each other, and it’s like the moment is frozen, suspended somewhere in the space between heartbeats and spans of breath, and then Clara finally speaks again, this time in English.

“I -“ she starts then stops, shakes her head and blinks. She’s remembering a white-haired Doctor and a dark-haired girl, a TARDIS repair shop and a sky that looked like it was burning. They are her memories, and yet they are not.

“What I just said, it’s part of a phrase, isn’t it?” Clara asks. “There’s a second part to it, though,” she says, and then she frowns, her eyebrows furrowing. “I don’t know how I remember that.”

But she does, and the rest of the words dance through her mind, just out of her grasp.

“Can you remember anything else?” the Doctor asks her gently, quietly, like he’s almost too afraid to ask aloud, too afraid to hope.

She searches, casting about in her mind for words she might know, but it’s like wandering about in the dark, and she can’t find what she’s looking for. She remembers running, remembers the words _I have to save him_ turning over and over again in her mind, like an unending symphony of her subconscious, but for the moment, that is all. There are no more lost words from Gallifrey. 

“No,” Clara says, shaking her head. “That’s all I remember right now. I wish I knew the rest though, I think - ” her voice goes quiet, “I think those words were important to me - to whatever girl I was - in another life.”

In three long strides, the Doctor cuts through the holographic stars and across the console to her, folding her into his arms and lacing his fingers through her hair. She shuts her eyes, listening to the comforting melody of his twin heartbeats, constant and steady and calm.

Gently, he presses a kiss to the tender skin of her temple, and then she feels his lips moving against her hair as he whispers softly in Gallifreyan, finishing the phrase she started.

Clara doesn't know the words, but they sound soft and sweet, like a song, and she feels a twinge of happiness when she hears them, and a glow in her chest, like somewhere in her subconscious she recognizes them even if she doesn’t understand them.

“What’s that mean?” she asks.

“The width and breadth of the sky cannot compare to the infinite cosmos within us,” he says.

And she knows it’s true.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m brand new to writing fanfic as of a couple months ago, and this is my first one for Doctor Who, so please go easy on me! I couldn’t find a Gallifreyan phrase to fit my story, so I made one up I thought fit. To me, the Doctor really is this kind of ultimate, star-lit fairy tale that transcends time, and I wanted to pay homage to that. If you’re on tumblr, my username is clara-oswin-oswald and I love chatting about Doctor Who, especially my otp whouffle!


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